Imagism
The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
[3] Imagist publications appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured works by many of the most prominent modernist figures in poetry and other fields, including Pound, H.D.
In 1909, Hulme left the Poets' Club and started meeting with Flint and other poets in a new group which Hulme referred to as the "Secession Club"; they met at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in London's Soho[7] to discuss plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse and the tanka and haiku and through the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems.
The interest in Japanese verse forms can be contextualized by the late Victorian and Edwardian revival of Chinoiserie and Japonism[8] as witnessed in the 1890s vogue for William Anderson's Japanese prints donated to the British Museum as well as in the influence of woodblock prints on paintings by Monet, Degas and van Gogh.
[9] Direct literary models were available from a number of sources, including F. V. Dickins's 1866 Hyak nin is'shiu, or, Stanzas by a Century of Poets, Being Japanese Lyrical Odes, the first English-language version of the Hyakunin Isshū,[10] a 13th-century anthology of 100 waka, the early 20th-century critical writings and poems of Sadakichi Hartmann, and contemporary French-language translations.
[12] In particular, Pound's studies of early European vernacular poetry had led him to an admiration of the condensed, direct expression that he detected in the writings of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti, amongst others.
For example, in his 1911–12 series of essays I gather the limbs of Osiris, Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her"), from the canzone En breu brizara'l temps braus: "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical".
He pointed out that Hulme was indebted to the Symbolist tradition, via W. B. Yeats, Arthur Symons and the Rhymers' Club generation of British poets and Mallarmé.
[16] Taupin concluded in his 1929 study that however great the divergence of technique and language "between the image of the Imagist and the 'symbol' of the Symbolists[,] there is a difference only of precision".
In his introduction, he wrote No one has written purer imagism than [Johnson] has, in the line Clear lie the fields, and fade into blue air, It has a beauty like the Chinese.
[18] The compression of expression that they achieved by following the Greek example complemented the proto-Imagist interest in Japanese poetry, and, in 1912, during a meeting with them in the British Museum tea room, Pound told H.D.
's, Hermes of the Ways, Priapus, and Epigram, appeared in the January 1913 issue, marking the beginning of the Imagism movement.
and Aldington:[24] Pound's note opened with a definition of an image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time".
[31][32] Pound's editorial choices were based on what he saw as the degree of sympathy that the writers displayed with Imagist precepts, rather than active participation in a group.
Ford was included at least partly because of his strong influence on Pound, as the younger poet made the transition from his earlier, Pre-Raphaelite-influenced style towards a harder, more modern way of writing.
These three volumes featured most of the original poets, plus the American John Gould Fletcher,[39] but not Pound, who had tried to persuade Lowell to drop the Imagist name from her publications and who sardonically dubbed this phase of Imagism "Amygism".
[40] Lowell persuaded D. H. Lawrence to contribute poems to the 1915 and 1916 volumes,[41] making him the only writer to publish as both a Georgian poet and an Imagist.
Marianne Moore, who was at most a fringe member of the group, carved out a unique poetic style of her own that retained an Imagist concern with compression of language.
"[49] With its demand for hardness, clarity and precision and its insistence on fidelity to appearances coupled with its rejection of irrelevant subjective emotions Imagism had later effects that are demonstratable in T. S. Eliot's Preludes and Morning at the Window and in Lawrence's animal and flower pieces.
[50] Imagism, which had made free verse a discipline and a legitimate poetic form, influenced a number of poetry circles and movements.
Clearly linking Objectivism's principles with Imagism's, Louis Zukofsky insisted, in his introduction to the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry, on writing "which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody."
Zukofsky was a major influence on the Language poets,[52] who carried the Imagist focus on formal concerns to a high level of development.
